BodyWorks is a one-day student led conference taking place on 3rd May 2018 at Northumbria University. BodyWorks takes an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to representations of bodies, embodiment and sensory experience across literature and culture. In doing so, we welcome responses from a range of disciplines, including cultural studies, literary studies, philosophy, arts, history, education, media, social sciences and medical humanities. Through this breadth of intellectual inquiry, the event aims to draw together a range of approaches and methodologies for exploring various facets of the contemporary shift towards studies of the body and emotions in the humanities.

Confirmed keynote speaker will be Professor Lisa Blackman from Goldsmiths University, London. Professor Blackman’s work intersects body studies with media and cultural theory, and she has written extensively on subjectivity, affect, the body and embodiment.

The Call for Papers is now open. Papers may choose to respond to recent scholarship in affect studies, new materialisms, posthumanism, grotesque theory, feminist theory or queer theory. We invite new perspectives on modes of depicting bodies and emotions, and on representations of physical difference. Broader still, we welcome papers which consider how the somatic and affective turn may influence our understanding of subjectivity, politics, ethics and aesthetics.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Depictions of bodies across space and time

Embodied emotions and theories of affect

Negotiating gender through the body

Sexuality and the body

Disabled bodies

Bodies and issues of subjectivity, selfhood, privacy and publicity

Bodies and the impact of class, race and ethnicity

Representations of sensory experience

Bodies and issues of religion, politics and ethics

Bodies as narrative devices

Non-human, inanimate and posthuman bodies

We welcome Masters, PhD and post-doctoral students. To participate, please submit an email to the conference organisers containing an abstract of between 200-300 words and a biography no longer than 150 words.

The deadline for submission is 20 January 2018, and we will inform participants around the end of February.